Today is the day Americans are encouraged to think about sacrifices rendered on their behalf on battlefields throughout history. The observance of Memorial Day began in the shadow of the Civil War, a conflict I now view as the first true modern war between the Core (the North, industrializing and connecting itself to a larger world) and the Gap (the South, or the 1800s version of the Persian Gulf oil-rich autocracies, connected in the same slim fashion to the world outside by cotton and marred by an unjust social order). Memorial Day was established to remind us all of the terrible sacrifices made in the name of freedom (the Union and the liberation of the slaves promised within), but it should likewise remind us of the folly of the wars best avoided (the South, in its cultural arrogance, was fighting not just the North, but the tides of history).
America stands at a genuine crossroads in history: we can revert to the sort of great power rivalries and conflicts of the 20th century or we can move ahead to the administering of a truly global security order made possible by the rise of the modern variant of globalization, whose recent expansion to encompass roughly two - thirds of humanity was due - in no small measure - to the genius of America's foreign policy vision coming out of World War II and the innumerable sacrifices rendered along the way during the decades-long Cold War. My generation has been offered a thrilling task easily considered the equal of that addressed by the Greatest Generation: not only to cement the strategic gains of the Cold War's great victory but to extend those gains to the roughly 2 billion in the Gap who do not yet enjoy either broad or just levels of connectivity to the global economy. To fail in this quest is not just to disappoint future generations, but to invalidate the sacrifices of past ones. My father and grandfathers' generations did not endure the sacrifices of two world wars simply to propel America to the historical opportunity to turn the 21st century into a rerun of their own, war - strewn decades of conflicts among great powers. No, their sacrifice asks for more from us all.
It is useful, in this regard, to remember that America's cumulative losses in combat since the end of the Vietnam War are roughly equal to what we lost - respectively - on the beaches of Normandy on 6 June 1944 and in Pearl Harbor on 6 December 1941 (i.e., in the range of 2500 to 3000). To note that is not to diminish anyone's sense of loss, which is always profound when a loved one dies in combat, but simply to reassure us that - as far as America is concerned - war is becoming an ever smaller portion of our reality thanks to such ultimate sacrifices.
There is great temptation now to withdraw from the difficult and lengthy efforts to wage a Global War on Terrorism, to focus myopically on our security alone and to disengage from the complex tasks of not just winning wars but winning the peace. The quickest route to this seemingly "safer" scenario is to focus all of our attention on a familiarly - arrayed foe, one in whom we can replicate the Cold War imagery of the Soviet Union. By achieving this singular bogeyman, some believe we can cease most of our current efforts to shrink the Gap, as well as all attempts to revamp our armed forces for the daunting tasks of building nations by rethinking the nexus between military interventions and the establishment of stable governments able to provide not just free markets but genuine liberty to their masses. This new effort is indeed an enormous challenge, and one easily shirked in favor of the familiar ways of the past, where we begged off such complex efforts in the Gap (known then as the Third World) primarily to plan brilliant but never waged wars against our arch-enemy in the bipolar order.
Lacking such a singular enemy today, it is quite tempting to trade in al Qaeda for China, and there are many in the Pentagon eager to do so. Why? The Global War on Terrorism has reached a natural point of redefinition after years of targeting al Qaeda's leadership and the twin regime-toppling efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq (Susan B. Glasser, "Review May Shift Terror Policies: U.S. Is Expected to Look Beyond Al Qaeda, Washington Post, 29 May 2005, p. A1), and in that review we can expect a strong effort by the forces of Big War inside the Pentagon to resist redefinition of both force structure (our investment in equipment and ships, aircraft, vehicles) and operations toward what is logically expected to be the result of that strategic review: a far more broad-based effort against violent extremism currently afflicting wide swaths of the Gap.
To the extent that such a strategic reordering of priorities comes to pass for America, it will represent the ultimate triumph of what used to be called the "lesser includeds" of U.S. national security, meaning those aspects of global security that we often dealt with and yet never ordered our forces around because they were logically considered to enjoy far less priority than the Cold War stand - off with the Soviets. That Cold War prioritization scheme allowed the Soviets to - in effect - size our forces for us, and absent that external standard these past 15 years, we've seen the Pentagon search the planet for a familiar image of that foe, locating it roughly a decade ago in China. In the minds of far too many Pentagon strategists, China offers the one great hope of retaining the essential force structure we spent the entirety of the Cold War constructing, lest it all be dissipated in a "crusade-like" effort to wage war against a tactic (terrorism) instead of an easily identified and familiar foe - the rising great power.
We are told by such "realists" that we have no choice but to view China today much as Britain was ultimately forced to view Kaiser Germany at the start of the 20th century: it's inevitable foe in great power wars - if not hot then terribly cold - that will inexorably reshape the global security environment for better or worse.
I believe such a conflict or series of conflicts would reshape the global security order only for the worse, for it would divide the global economy into competing spheres and - by doing so - would effectively kill the real peace dividend of the Cold War: its unprecedented and enormous expansion beyond the narrow definition of the "West" (the Old Core of North America, Western Europe and Industrialized Asia). That Cold War effort was truly Sisyphean, recalling the ancient myth of the king forced by the gods to ceaselessly roll a giant rock up a hill, only to see his efforts rewarded by the constant futility of having the boulder fall back down before he could get it up and over the top. For America to accept the notion that we can move beyond our Cold War fixation on great power foes and take up the far more complex challenge of reshaping the security environment of the Gap is to leave behind these familiar labors and race toward an unknown valley on the far side of that summit I firmly believe was marked by the experiences of 9/11.
In short, shrinking the Gap is first and foremost about letting go of the familiar past and accepting the challenges of what seems to be an unknowable future.
But of course, it isn't an unknowable future but merely a back - to - the - future shift of enormous proportions, one that sees us resurrect a type of military force we haven't employed on the battlefield since we settled the West across the 1800s: the frontier force that not only wages Leviathan - like war but administers to an embryonic system of integrating economic and social order. In many ways, America returns to a myopic focus on the details of small wars and small victories, to an integrating function that features skirmish after skirmish instead of culminating and clear - cut inter - state wars (which, by the way, are disappearing from the world). The "lesser includeds" of the Cold War now become the "greater inclusive" by which we shape not just our military forces but our entire foreign policy establishment, but that can only occur if we are able to demote the concept of great power war from its perch as number one ordering principle of the Pentagon to that of merely hedged - against conflict scenario, meaning we dedicate a certain portion of our scenario planning and force generation against this particular scenario, trusting in our ability to maintain a sufficient hedge against what's out there in potential great power foes (I'll spot you China for the next twenty years, but who else?).
This choice of "what to hedge against" versus "what to focus our main military effort on" is the essential strategic question of the day, reflected not just in the current policy review of the Global War on Terrorism but the all - important Quadrennial Defense Review of the Pentagon, where the forces of Big War inside the U.S. military are putting up one hell of a fight against the notion that we'll reshape our forces for the long-haul effort inside the Gap. Why? Because it will favor the labor - intensive efforts of the Marines, the Army and Special Operations Command, resulting in far less funding for the more capital - intensive capabilities of the Navy and Air Force.
You might be tempted to assume that in maintaining the force we inherited from the Cold War our troops would be safer in the years ahead, but you would be wrong. For what we spend on the Leviathan will put the SysAdmin troops at greater risk in the field. This is not a guns - versus - butter choice, but a submarine - versus - body - armor sort of choice, because if we continue to fund the Leviathan to the detriment of the SysAdm, we'll simply stock up on platforms we're extremely unlikely to need while denying our boots - on - the - ground the equipment they are certain to need.
Naturally, risk is associated with both sides of this choice. But ask yourself: is it easier to manage the risk of a rising, increasingly developed China or the descent/collapse of failed or authoritarian regimes in the Gap? Which of these two great strategic scenarios of the 21st century do you think we can manage on the side, treating it as a lesser included to which we devote incremental efforts?
I know only this: many lives will be needless squandered in our efforts to shrink the Gap - a strategic reality that I remind you cannot be voted out of office - if we do not find a way to support our troops in the manner they deserve. That is the sort of inescapable "realism" we need to embrace in the years ahead.
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